


Wrong... With Rare Exceptions

by tazia101



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: (Except The Author Still Sympathizes), (Send Help), Emotional Manipulation, Excessive Exposition, Gen, Guilt, Kid Fic, Psychology Buzzwords, a lot of lying, non-sympathetic Deceit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:28:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22070332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tazia101/pseuds/tazia101
Summary: When all of the Sides were younger, Deceit and Morality were best friends. But that was a long time ago.
Relationships: Morality | Patton Sanders & Deceit Sanders
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	Wrong... With Rare Exceptions

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on @knight-in-the-stars, my inactive tumblr blog, in 2018. 
> 
> Based on an anonymous ask who wanted to know why Deceit chose to masquerade as Patton in 'Can Lying Be Good,' suggesting they could be siblings. My multishipping ass doesn't do well with sibling headcanons, but the ask caught my interest and I decided to write a childhood friendship fic. 
> 
> The title comes from 'Can Lying Be Good' and it is a quote from Patton about lying.

Some would find it hard to believe that Deceit and Morality could walk hand-in-hand. But Morality is an ever-changing thing, and always more complicated than it (or he) may seem.

They all used to be different, back when their roles were less defined, and the eyes that they looked out of couldn’t see over the kitchen counter.

Logic was less cautious, and with Creativity he pushed Thomas to explore the world, somehow surprised every time that fire burned and falls bruised. They were an inseparable pair, learning from stories and extrapolating about the world. In those days, every shouting woman was an evil step-mother, and every animal outside was simply too shy to talk. Logic and Creativity agreed that if Thomas could catch a squirrel, it would be his friend: but they were always too fast, scrabbling away up the nearest tree.

Logan, now fully grown, has words for his past self. ‘Preoperational, concrete operational,’ he calls himself. Words to separate when the outside world didn’t seem as real as the fictions they created, and when everything became suddenly too real, too pressing.

He has words for Patton, too. ‘Preconventional,’ he calls the memory, of when Patton was different.

Patton nods and smiles and doesn’t really understand, but that’s okay. After all, he knows his past self better than Logan ever will. They were all different back then, and Patton was no exception.

Back then, no one thought of him as Morality. He doesn’t think any of them actually knew the word at the time, much less grasped the concept. Emotions had been Patton’s driving force, and they were the only thing that kept Thomas on the beaten track. Patton and Anxiety worked together, combining fear of their parents and desire for their love, forming rules and limits. Logan and Roman would have happily climbed the tree in the backyard again and again, without Anxiety reminding them of the pain of the fall, and Patton tearing up as he remembered the way Thomas’s parents had yelled.

They all worked together, of course. There were technically no teams. But Patton and Anxiety were the ones who kept their attention on Thomas’s parents and drew lines around the others, trying to limit the dangers that they faced.

Later, those lines would blur and give way to Thomas’s own rules, based on beliefs and experience, but to a four-year-old, a parent’s will was close to divine law. And more than that, it was concrete. To the four-year old, nothing existed outside of the concrete, outside of what he could taste and feel and see.

–

When Thomas woke up thirsty one morning, Logic told him to go get a drink. Creativity helped him to drag a chair from the dining room into the kitchen, so that he could climb up onto the counter and open one of the cupboards to get a glass. Anxiety lurked in the corner, looking nervous but obviously deciding not to interfere.

Logic and Creativity worked together to figure out where to put the glass and how to turn the taps, and soon the glass was overflowing.

 _Hold it with two hands_ , Patton reminded Thomas in his mother’s voice, as he turned off the taps and picked up his glass of water.

Thomas obediently shifted his grip, but didn’t know how to account for the slide of the water that had sloshed over the side, making the glass slippery. It fell from his hands, and shattered on the side of the sink.

Thomas gasped and flinched backwards, away from the shards. Suddenly, they were falling: he had slipped off the counter. Anxiety darted forwards, faster than any of the others could follow, and Thomas managed to land on all fours, shaken but unhurt.

“Your parents are going to be _so mad_ ,” Anxiety hissed.

“They’re going to yell,” Patton agreed, feeling tears form in Thomas’s eyes at the thought. “We were bad. We broke their glass!”

“We have to do something,” Logan agreed.

“Put it back together!” Roman suggested, and all of them gave him a disbelieving look. They didn’t know how to fix a glass!

“Leave it,” a new voice suggested, and they turned to face the newcomer.

There was another Side behind them, one that Patton had never seen before. His face was half-covered in scales, one eye gold and slitted as he swept his gaze across the other Sides. He wore a bowler hat that was far too big for him, and swayed on his head precariously. “Go back to bed and they’ll think it fell out of the cupboard.”

“They’ll know,” Patton protested, and Anxiety nodded. “They’ll know we did a bad thing.”

“They always know,” Anxiety said.

“No, they don’t,” Logan said suddenly, and attention turned to him. “Remember when we ate the extra cookie? No one noticed.” Unrest swept through the group, as they realized the truth of Logan’s words.

“So we can… hide it?” Roman asked, turning again to the new Side, who nodded.

“They’ll never know if we go back to bed now.”

“What if they find out?” Anxiety said, raising his voice slightly as the others began to relax into the plan.

“They can’t,” Patton told him. “They’ll be mad. They can’t be mad, so we have to hide it.” He walked over to the new Side and smiled at him. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one,” the new Side muttered, tilting the scaled side of his face away and looking at Patton from the corner of his eye. “You can call me Deceit.”

–

From that day on, Patton and Deceit were a pair.

Every time a disaster was averted, every time Thomas’s parents were convinced an accident was just bad luck, or the dog, or one of his brothers, Deceit grew closer to them.

By the time they reached school, Deceit was Patton’s protector. They went almost everywhere together, and Deceit even started to sleep in Patton’s room. He always said that his own room was dark and cold and awful, and Patton’s was so much better. So Patton smiled and let him curl close to him at night.

When Thomas spilled his juice on the third day of Kindergarten, Deceit told him to say it was Jack. When the teacher made Jack clean it up, despite his protests, Patton felt Thomas’s relief in his chest like an ice cream cone on a summer day.

When Thomas told his parents that someone had stolen his snack, his parents were very upset. They hugged him and told him that it wasn’t okay, that they would stop it from happening again, and that he could have another pudding with dinner tonight. Thomas and Patton were glowing with pride, with certainty of their parents’ love, with the intensity of the attention given to their story. The extra pudding was just a bonus!

When Thomas told one of his classmates that his parents knew Tom Cruise, the story quickly spread around the class, and kids started crowding around him at lunch. Suddenly, he had more of an audience for his stories, and Creativity would work with Deceit to spin epic adventures. The class soaked it up, eyes wide, and Patton drank in Thomas’s pride, dizzy with attention.

Deceit was funny, too. He pulled faces and wiggled weird parts of his face and he could touch his nose with his tongue, which Patton couldn’t do no matter how hard he tried. Patton loved him, and Deceit complimented him so often that Patton was sure he loved him too.

But things were always changing. The changes were slow, always creeping up unnoticed, but steady.

Thomas knew that the people he lied about felt bad. Jack, cleaning up the juice Thomas had spilled, had been almost crying. Mary, who he had blamed for getting his shirt dirty after he had rolled in the mud, had sobbed as her parents were called. His mother had been quiet for hours after having a fight with Thomas’s older brother, which ended with his Gameboy confiscated for letting the dog out at night, and a door slammed upstairs as the teen continued to protest that it hadn’t been him.

For a while, these were facts kept by Logan, neutrally and calmly observed. Getting blamed for things felt bad. It was a fact that Thomas knew. It was true for him and for others. This was also a fact that Thomas knew.

One day, Patton realized that _feeling bad_ wasn’t just a fact. It wasn’t something that Logan should keep, but something that Patton needed to have. Logan knew that other people could feel bad, but he didn’t know how fear and guilt twisted up your stomach. He didn’t know how tears prickled in your eyes for long moments before spilling over, didn’t know that anger could linger for days in the background.

Guilt.

Patton began to feel guilty, and slowly, the lies stopped making things better. He felt just as bad as if he had been yelled at by the teacher, even though he hadn’t been. He felt bitter and angry, but there was no one to be angry at. He felt like crying every time he saw someone they had tricked into getting punished. He felt badly for his parents, who thought it was their fault the dog had gotten into the backyard to dig up the garden again.

He drew away from Deceit, spending less time with him and more time on his own.

Deceit finally confronted him when Patton tried to shut him out of his room.

“My room is so dark,” he said. “You can’t see anything. It’s so lonely there. I can’t believe you would send me back.”

But Patton ignored him, his mind still on Jack’s reaction, when they had blamed him for the juice they had spilled. He had been so genuinely confused when the teacher confronted him. He hadn’t known what was happening. Patton’s stomach felt twisted into knots.

“Fine. If you’re really going to send me away, I’m not going to come back,” Deceit said, and Patton looked up, eyes widening. As much as he was beginning to dislike Deceit’s methods, he didn’t want his friend to leave forever! “I’ll hate you if you kick me out,” Deceit added, folding his arms.

Tears formed at the thought, and Patton didn’t pause to second-guess himself before opening the door. Deceit was leaning against the wall opposite, and straightened when the door opened. Patton reached out a hand to him and Deceit almost threw himself into the embrace, twisting his hands into Patton’s shirt to keep him close, tucking his face into Patton’s neck so that his cold scales slid against the underside of his jaw.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and he sounded so desperately relieved that Patton held him closer, until his scales were warm from Patton’s body heat. As he pulled Deceit into his room, he promised himself that he could do this, without isolating his friend in that dark place that he so hated to return to.

–

It wasn’t long before Thomas made another mistake: he forgot his homework book at school.

“Tell them that you don’t have any homework today,” Deceit directed. Logan nodded in automatic agreement.

“No,” Patton said, standing up from his beanbag. “Tell them the truth. Tell them we forgot it.”

“What?” Deceit’s surprise was plain. “No. Patton, they’ll think Thomas is dumb. They’ll punish him.”

“Then that’s okay,” Patton said, ignoring the way his stomach twisted. “We should tell the truth anyways.”

“The truth?” Deceit sneered. “That Thomas was careless? That he was so wrapped up in his comic that he didn’t even think about homework? Oh, why don’t we tell them the rest, if we’re being _honest_? Tell them that he didn’t do his homework last week, and that he lost his Tetris game, it wasn’t stolen, and that we broke the glass in the kitchen and we let Foster out into the yard to dig up the marigolds? I’m sure they’ll react very well to all of that.”

“That’s not what I…” Patton faltered. Deceit had helped them so many times. Why was he fighting Patton on this? “I just mean that this isn’t that big of a deal,” he said. “Thomas’s parents will understand.”

“Will they?” Deceit tapped a finger against his chin and tried to raise one of his eyebrows. It didn’t go very well: none of them had quite mastered that trick yet.

“Maybe?” Patton glanced out at Thomas’s view. He was staring at the bookshelf as he deliberated what to tell his parents, twisting his fingers into each other as he listened to the Sides argue.

“Better to be safe,” Deceit said. “Isn’t that right, _Anxiety_?” Anxiety, who none of them had even noticed lurking in the corner, jumped at his name and then gave a reluctant shrug. Deceit laughed at him, then turned his attention back to the others. “It’s just a little lie,” he said. “Tell them that we don’t have any homework and we might get to watch TV with them.”

Patton nodded. Logan nodded. Roman nodded. Anxiety watched from the corner, his eyes dark.

Thomas walked into the living room and his parents immediately asked about his homework, as Logan had known they would.

“I don’t have any today!” Thomas announced.

“Really?” His mother looked confused. “I thought you had to practice a letter every day. Aren’t you on W?”

“No,” Thomas said. “S’a Tueday. No homework on Tueday.”

 _Tell the truth_ , Patton urged him. The twisting feeling was back, and every additional lie added to it. He could no longer stand it. He didn’t care that Deceit was staring at him, shocked betrayal in his eyes. He didn’t care that Thomas’s parents might be mad. _Tell them that you lied, that you forgot the book. It’s wrong to lie_. The thought hadn’t occurred to him before, but as soon as he thought it, he knew that he was right. What else had Pinocchio taught them? Why else had Thomas yelled at the screen during Aladdin, telling him to stop lying and just tell the truth? _It’s wrong to lie, you’re doing a bad thing, you have to tell the truth._

Thomas started to cry. His parents looked to each other in surprise, then rushed to his side.

“What’s wrong?” his mother asked, gathering him into her arms.

“I… I lied,” Thomas confessed between sobs. “I left my homework book at school. I forgot it. M’sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said his father. “Thank you for telling us the truth.”

“It was very brave,” added his mother. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to lie to us, Thomas. Lying is never okay.”

“I just… didn’t want you to be mad,” Thomas confessed.

“Honey.” His mother held him a little tighter. “I’m not mad. I’m very happy you told me.”

“Oh.” Thomas clung a little tighter and closed his eyes, breathing in the familiar comfort of his parents’ presence.

In the mindscape, all of the Sides found themselves crying. Patton sobbed with Thomas, their breaths matched. Anxiety and Logan cried silent tears that they wiped away impatiently, and Roman hiccupped, angrily scrubbing at his eyes.

Only Deceit was unaffected, still staring at Patton angrily.

“Why did you do that? I had everything under control.”

“Lying is wrong,” Patton said, trying to wipe his tears away but realizing it was useless. “She said so. And she isn’t mad. You lied. You said she would be mad.”

“I never!” Deceit said, putting one hand to his chest.

“You did!” Patton insisted. “And you said they would think he’s dumb. But they’re proud of him! We should have told the truth about everything.” The tears choked his voice, made it unsteady as he continued. “We never should have listened to you.”

“Do you… not want me around anymore?” Deceit asked, his voice softening.

“No.” Patton crossed his arms. “I want you to leave us alone.”

“Fine! But I won’t come back! I’ll _never_ come back,” Deceit shouted, turning away with his hands clenched into fists.

“Perfect!” Patton screamed at him, the tears on his cheeks turning to anger, his own hands balling up. “I don’t want to see you again anyways!”

“I don’t even care,” Deceit shouted back. “I couldn’t care _less_. I hate you, I always hated you. You’re not special. I never liked you.” Patton flinched at that, thinking back to all the warm nights, the sleepovers, the pillow fights, the laughter.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, suddenly realizing that he was losing a friend. Something that he never thought would be possible here in the mindscape. They were parts of a whole, after all, how could they fall apart from each other?

“I’m not,” Deceit retorted, and walked out the door. He looked back for a moment, and Patton saw tears streaking his face before he turned and was gone.

–

Patton knew why Deceit had chosen his face to wear, his voice to use. If he knew any of their mannerisms, it was Patton. As Virgil retold the story of what he had missed, he grimaced, imagining Deceit pulling together memories of the cartoons they had watched, the ridiculous scenarios they had laughed about recreating with Roman, channeling all of them into his performance.

He wondered, even now, if there had been a different way to deal with Deceit, some way to keep them all together.

But it was a long time ago. And they had all been so different, back then.

As he intertwined his fingers with Virgil’s, trying his best to smile, he thought that he wasn’t unhappy with the way things turned out. Regret was bitter on his tongue, but his family was so warm, so close, and so trusting. Deceit had no place among them, and that was always going to be the case, no matter how it had been in the past.

**Author's Note:**

> Some psychology theories that Logan references in this fic: 
> 
> 'PreoperationaI' is a stage of mental development from age 2-7 in which children develop memory and imagination, as well as some abstract thought. 
> 
> 'Concrete Operational' runs from age 7 to 11, and is the stage of development where children begin to understand that other people exist outside of them, that they have separate experiences, emotions, and opinions. (This beginning of this stage is marked by kids starting to lie: they finally understand that they are capable of knowing things separately from others. That's not something we're born knowing! Kids before this stage assume if they're told something that their parents already know it.) 
> 
> These theories of development are from a fellow named Piaget, and the stages I talked about are the middle two of four. Then a guy named Kohlberg took Piaget's theories and decided to focus on the development of morality rather than logic. 
> 
> According to him, 'preconventional morality' is found in most children under nine: here, children make moral judgments based on consequence and reward. An action is bad if it results in a negative consequence, especially by parents. 
> 
> If you're interested, you can look up their full theories. Both of them have been commonly challenged and I'm not sure if they're still regarded as accurate, but they sure are interesting! And they provide a cool framework to write about the Sanders Sides with. What else is psychology for??


End file.
